This blog runs parallel to a new poetry blog 'Poetry Pinfold' (poetrypinfold.blogspot.com), and a new blog with poems in Dutch (bartnooteboomgedichten.blogspot.com)

Saturday, June 2, 2018

373. Ontology and discovery

Here I
discuss the link between the ontology that I presented in preceding items in
this blog and the theory of discovery that I proposed earlier.

The central
feature that I adopted from ‘Object oriented ontology’ (‘3O’, presented, in
particular, by Harman and Garcia) is that any object, not only material
objects, has two dimensions of existence: an inside (‘What is in it’) and an
outside (‘What it is in’). The criterion for an object is that it has a more or
less durable structure of its elements. I also adopt Garcia’s idea that the
object is the ‘difference between what comes in and what goes out’.

I find this attractive because it is
dynamic from the start. Objects develop from interaction with other objects,
which affect what comes in and goes out and the development of what happens in
between, in the object.

Another thing that I find particularly
important is that here there is room for scientific analysis as the analysis of the composition of an
object, the inside, in the natural sciences, and a non- or less scientific, at
best a ‘scholarly’ consideration of the outside, of how objects are used and
experienced, in their ‘phenomenology’.
This includes philosophy and most of the humanities. Neither analysis not phenomenology
suffices for an adequate understanding of the object. This necessitates modesty
on both sides of the divide.

Another
thing that I find intriguing is that this view of existence as functioning in
interaction with other objects is also the view of present quantum theory of
physics, according to which elementary particles, and states of systems, appear
only in interaction with others. In human affairs, people are not autonomous,
as economics claims, but develop in interaction with others

In the
theory of invention, in a ‘cycle of discovery’, that I proposed in 2000 and
summarized in item 356 of this bog, that change of an object in the form of some
practice or knowledge arises from a interaction between ‘what is in’ it and
’what it is in’.

To make
this more concrete, I modelled the object as a ‘script’, i.e. network of nodes
that represent component activities or ideas, which have ‘subscripts’, while the
script as a whole fits in a wider ‘superscript’. The canonical example is a
restaurant, with component activities as nodes.

The logic
of discovery now is as follows. When an object moves, or is moved, into a novel
environment (‘what it is in’), it meets with new challenges to survival, which
necessitate adaptation of ‘what is in it’, in order to cope what comes in and
goes out in that new environment.

At first
this is sought in ‘differentiation’, minor changes (in subscripts of nodes),
while maintaining its basic logic (script structure of nodes). In
differentiation, not yet jeopardizing fundamental logic or structure (of the
nodes), adjustments are derived from earlier development, reconsidering things
that failed or were inappropriate then.

Next, when
that does not suffice, there are more radical shifts in importing subscripts or
entire nodes from other scripts that are locally successful where the focal
script fails, thus changing more radically what is in the script. This entails
experiments with hybrids of elements from old local scripts, in what I call
‘reciprocation’. This is important in yielding opportunities to experiment, to
tinker, trying out alternative combinations, basic logics or structures,
finding out where the limitations lie and where conflicts or complications
between old and new parts arise.

This is
groping, still tentative, with incoherence between old and new, and the need
for a more radical change, of basic logic or design, in a recombination of
nodes from old and new scripts, and their contents (possible subscripts), in
‘accommodation’.

This, next,
is followed by subsequent optimisation, with adjustments in the components
(consolidation). That, finally, converges on a ‘dominant design’ and
stabilization sets in.

The circle
is, in other words, an alternation between contraction and expansion, of
content (what is in it) and context (what it is in), and between stability
(consolidation), minor change (differentiation) and fundamental change
(reciprocation, accommodation). Along the cycle, one needs some stability, if
only to find out where the ‘real limits’ of a practice lie, and to build up
both the motivation and hints for renewal.

One can see
all this as an elaboration of Kuhn’s notions of paradigm shift (here: accommodation), and normal science (here: consolidation). Then what the circle adds is
how you get from the one to the other.

Where does
the urge behind the cycle of discovery come from? The urge to manifest oneself,
to try and fail, to fall and stand up, to go out and explore, Plato’s thymos, Spinoza’s conatus, Bergson’s elan vital,
Hegel’s absolute Spirit, Nietzsche’s will to power, where do they come from?
Could it be from evolution, because its process of creative destruction, as
described, yields an evolutionary advantage in discovery?

Note the
connection with the ontology that I discussed in Chapter 2. The crux of that
was that an object has an inside and an outside, in the environment it is in,
and with which it interacts, and that its inside has a more or less durable
coherence of elements. According to the cycle of invention discussed here, when
the environment stabilizes, the object consolidates, in the absence of novel
impulse. It needs to change its environment to meet new sources, needs and
opportunities for novelty. Then, it meets stresses, challenges to change its
structure, but does not do so instantly, but experiments, more to the extent
that it lives, has intentions, with adaptations, and with hybrids from its own
structure and elements from the new environment. And then it may cease to be
the object it was, developing a new structure from old and new elements.

Finally,
coincidence or not, the ‘loop quantum theory’ that is one of the recent
contenders of fundamental physics, models space and time as networks of nodes,
as I do with scripts to model objects.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Poetry blog

Poems posted on Poetrypinfold.blogspot.comComing down (a memory of Genevaa) NightYin and YangPoetry pinfoldSiëstaDown and out in the mindThe stream bears light (the Nasrid palace at the Alhambra)From one to many Sunday in GoudaOn the canalStanzas of stone (San Gimignano, torre grosso)The words have a ballNo rocket scienceMontreuxNew roomGenerationsSister (Paris)MotherMother 2Blessed solitudeCivil servantAdolescent lamentThe streamTender rip-offNight 2BirdsAtlas unmovedSeminar on KrakmaroDiplomacyDepositionWinter train in ThuringenSarajevoFar aheadHat trick on the canalFlowers of deathOn a camping one night

top 100 blog award

awarded October 2016

Bundles of blog

On my website (www.bartnooteboom.nl) I offer selected items from the blog, bundled according to theme, such as:basic incomea way out for socialism? identity, cultureevolution multiple causalityGod and religionrobots

powerknowledge, truth and inventionethics and moralitythe human conditionself and othertrustmeaning

Eastern and Western philosophypuzzles in philosophydemocracy, autocracy, and fascismvoice and exitNietzsche, nihilism and beyondTime, duration, and discontinuity: Bergson, Derrida, and Bachelardsystem tragedy

power, Foucaultsix more pieces on FoucaultLevinasMontaigneHeideggerBaudrillardWittgensteinZizek and Hegel